One of my earliest childhood memories was of living in a house in Geelong. My parents were young and the rented home wasn’t fancy, but it will always stay in my mind thanks to it’s epically long hallway. It stretched from the front door to the back of the house, where my bedroom was. As a toddler, I’d charge up and down the hallway on my little toddler bike. It felt like the hallway went on forever.
Such memories are increasingly becoming a thing, quite literally, of the past. Residential home design trends have been leaning away from hallways for some time – they’re certainly not the length-of-house-spanning hallways of yesteryear.
The hallway is seen as lacking in function
With modern houses getting smaller, there is a greater emphasis on adding floor space to rooms seen with the most function. Why have a hallway taking up space, when that additional space could instead be used to increase the size of a lounge room?
Beyond the simple utility of getting a person into a house and giving them passage to walk through a home, hallways were also used to provide a certain amount of soundproofing between bedrooms and other rooms. Brian Juedes, the VP of Product Design at Taylor Morrison, advises that “soundproofing in residential production building is very rare.” Instead, the trend is to achieve the same functional benefit by being more strategic about where rooms are placed and how they are structured. For example, a wardrobe may be built into a bedroom wall as a noise mitigation tactic.
Hallways are terrible for accessibility
For Australians with mobility problems, a hallway can cause a number of challenges. The width can be cumbersome for wheelchairs and difficult to navigate for those with walkers. Some mobility issues can be overcome with grab rails, improved lighting, and other modifications. But, if you are considering a new build and have accessibility concerns as a concern, a hallway is not a consideration you would take seriously.
Open space
Just as the offices we work in are usually open-plan, so to are the homes that we live in. While open-plan offices don’t have the best reputation of somewhere you want to be, in an open-plan home, you don’t have to deal with cubicles or your easily-distracted work-mate Jeff.
Instead, a home designed with open space gives residents more optionality when it comes to how much space one wants to dedicate to their lounge area vs their dining area. The flexibility is a feature, not a bug.
Typically, when you open the door to a new-build home, you are walking through a small foyer to the side of a living room area. It may be designated as it’s own individual space, but it contributes to the sense that the living room area is more spacious.
For example, you can see this Metricon design The Lucca 29 has an entryway that leads straight to the stairs, alongside the living room. It’s all open and serves as a singular space.
Even homes that have the remnants of a hallway are still far more subtle. You can see in this Bellriver Homes design, the Annangrove 31, that the hallway is labelled instead as a foyer and occupies a very small amount of space.
